During the last 25 years many Western countries have witnessed substantial changes in the roles of veterinarians working in dairy cattle practice. Until the 1970s, the emphasis of their work was on the treatment of individual, clinically diseased animals, and it was only when the farmer decided a particular cow needed attention that he would call out his practitioner—it was an era of passive veterinary attention.
In the early 1970s, however, things began to change. Herd fertility schemes were introduced, first in the UK and Australia, and shortly afterwards in other Western countries. They represented a turning point in veterinary services offered to the dairy farmer. Their introduction was due mainly to a dramatic increase in the average size of dairy herds—an attempt by farmers to increase labor productivity at a time when economic margins between income and costs were decreasing—but which resulted in far less time being spent attending to individual cows. Consequently, many problems arose, but in particular related to health and fertility.
Towards the end of the 1990s further developments in dairy cattle practice took place in some Western European countries, Australia and North America. The protocol used for herd health programs consisted of three core elements: (1) the routine monitoring of animals, farm conditions, farm management and farm data, (2) the analysis of problems and the identification of impending problems, (3) the introduction of preventative actions. For a practitioner to carry out the task of “monitoring” he or she must easily and rapidly be able to identify when specific signs and symptoms in the animals or farming system deviate from an acceptable, preset norm. When monitoring animals a number of parameters are assessed. In all cases, the focus is on the early identification and tracking of deviations from a predetermined range of target figures, and on providing farmers with basic information relating to their animals' performance.
Monitoring in these systems was executed in one of three ways: as a general inspection of the farm and animals, by assigning a score to individual animals, or through epidemiological surveys that generate a probability figure. Examples of these different approaches may be found in the literature. Most noticeably, the late 1990s were recognized as a time when risk management became a more prominent issue on the dairy farm.
A common problem with these systems is the difficulty in monitoring large herds and also great inconsistencies when monitoring is based on human observation. A number of automated systems for monitoring parameters associated with health and fertility, such as temperature, have been proposed. Examples include those found in the following patents and publications: 2010/0261981; U.S. Pat. No. 6,773,405; 2002/0010390; 2008/0312511; 2002/0154015; U.S. Pat. No. 6,113,539; U.S. Pat. No. 7,164,361; 2002/0010390; U.S. Pat. No. 7,026,941; U.S. Pat. No. 6,664,897; 2010/0160809; 2009/0187392; 2003/0137431; and 2004/0233971.
These systems suffer several general drawbacks. First, data transmission from the systems is unreliable and difficult to implement in barn and feedlot environments. Second, many of the systems rely on RFID technology which requires that specialized equipment needs to be installed in close proximity to the animals being monitored. Third, the temperatures sensors themselves are unreliable and not general suitable for use in large scale.